When operating a local business, it is rather easy to garner traffic to a website. When operating throughout multiple cities or wanting to reach those audiences, however, it becomes a bit more difficult to effectively target each location. Nevertheless, there are plenty of search engine optimization strategies that can be utilized to get your business the attention it deserves in more than one city. We will outline a few basic tricks that you can use to begin having your site or business appear in search results in any and every city you wish to target.

Create Separate Pages

Search engine experiments show us that you can only effectively optimize any given page for three to four locations before “overdoing it”. Generally speaking, we are referring to minor and major metropolitan areas; targeting micro-communities within the same metropolitan area can be done rather effectively from one central page. By these standards, a business offering services or products in Los Angeles, New York City, London and Tokyo would want to create separate optimized pages for each locale. Similarly, smaller cities within a state or region may need this approach as well. This helps search engines and gives them the impression that you are not trying to “stuff” the search results.

Use Maps

One of the best ways to optimize your page’s location reputation is by using an embedded map that shows the location you serve or the building from which you operate. Google Maps is excellent and obviously works well with its fellow search engine algorithms. You can easily embed a map of any location by searching for it via Google Maps, clicking the ‘Link’ icon in the upper-right hand corner, followed by copying and pasting the selected HTML code into any part of your web page. This not only shows customers where you are, but also lets search engine spiders and bots know as well.

Try Out Some Keywords

Implementing a variety of different keywords and phrases into each locale’s page design is vital to improving the likelihood that search engines are going to view you favorably. We recommend sticking to 2-3 phrases per page so that it does not appear that you are attempting to circumvent the algorithms set forth by Google, Bing and others. If you are struggling for keyword and phrase ideas, try using Pingler’s Keyword Suggestion Generator, which takes a phrase or words that you put in and suggests alternative keyword and phrase ideas.

Use Google Places

Google Places is a great way to garner attention for your site or business at the local level and is quite simple to setup. All you need is a Google account associated with your website to begin. You can target a specific location and provide the contact information or address of the establishment which will then be reflected in search results for a variety of phrases. When people search for “[specific type of business][city]”, your site will be reflected in Google Places’ results. Google Places is fairly well indexed alongside regular Google algorithms, so the better you perform in the search engine, the higher spot your business or site will have in Places.